aqu
aqu is a web marketplace for ornamental fish and aquatic life in Korea. Hobbyists, small breeders, and aquarium shops currently trade through Naver cafés and forum threads that were never designed for commerce. aqu gives them a real storefront, where species, size, price, delivery, and availability are structured information instead of free text.
Buyers browse sale and wanted listings, filter by delivery, price, and status, and move from a listing to bookmark, chat, or purchase. Breeders get store, order, and settlement tools of their own.
Challenge
Korea's aquarium trade runs on forums never built for trading
Large aquarium shops run their own sites, but the hobby has no shared marketplace.
Most trading happens in Naver cafés and DC galleries. Free text posts where species, size, price,
delivery, and availability appear in whatever form the seller chose, if at all.
Buyers scroll thread by thread to compare. Sellers rebuild their reputation post by post.
Both sides work around the platform instead of with it.
Global counterparts exist, such as Yahoo Auctions in Japan and AquaBid in the West, but both are dated, and neither serves Korean hobbyists.
Research
The problem was not demand, but a market with no proper venue
I analyzed where Korean aquarists actually trade. The most active trading café holds 151,310 members
but only about 2,000 two week actives, a 1.3% activity rate that users themselves attribute to an outdated UI
on a platform never meant for transactions.
The demand signal points the other way
On DC Inside, the Apistogramma gallery ranks 207th of 61,663 minor galleries, in the top 0.34% and first among biology topics.
Buying a fish
Species, size, and price appeared in whatever form the seller chose.
Sale offers and wanted posts looked identical in the feed.
Availability was buried in comment threads.
Comparing listings meant scrolling post by post.
Selling a fish
Every listing was rewritten from scratch as a forum post.
Reputation had to be rebuilt with every new thread.
Reserved and sold states lived in comments and edits.
Payment and delivery were arranged one DM at a time.
How might we?
How might we turn free text forum trades into structured listings, so buyers can compare fish at a glance and sellers can actually run a store?
My role
I shaped the product from market analysis to a 51 page system
I sized the market from community data and defined the product strategy. An open market platform first,
with auctions and secondhand gear trading as later versions.
From there I designed the information architecture and screens across the 51 pages of the service, store browsing,
listing and detail pages, orders and checkout, chat, and the breeder-side store, order, and settlement tools.
Key contributions
01
Market and community analysis
02
Product strategy and versioned roadmap
03
Listing card and status system
Key solutions
Three decisions that turn forum threads into a marketplace
aqu is structured around what a trade actually needs. Findable listings, unmistakable intent,
and enough information to act.
Dashboard for writers
Outcome
The web MVP designs the full trade, from discovery to settlement
01
51 pages
One architecture covering
02
2 intents
listings fully separated
03
3 filters
Delivery, price, and transaction status
04
3 statuses
On sale, reserved, sold
05
1 journey
Discovery to bookmark, chat, purchase, and settlement.
Reflection
A two sided marketplace is designed twice
Every decision had to work for two roles at once, the buyer scanning cards, and the breeder who registers stock,
answers chats, processes orders, and reads settlement reports. Consistent listings are only as good as the seller's input,
so the structure has to make good input the easiest path.
Live animal trading also runs on states. A fish can be reserved or sold minutes after listing, so status had to be
first class everywhere. Card badge, detail page, order queue. And because trades happen between strangers,
trust surfaces such as seller profiles, locations, and clear policies carry as much weight as the catalog itself.
The next step is to validate the listing structure with actual aquarists before launch, starting with the seller side.
If registering a fish is harder than writing a cafe post, the marketplace never gets its supply.
